Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Elon Musk's Twitter Ultimatum Brought Employees to Their Breaking Point (vanityfair.com)
17 points by rrauenza 3 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



Despite the headline, it is an interesting and balanced article, although it ends abruptly because it's a book excerpt.


First paragraph we're introduced to Randall, the Twitter employee but we don't know his job there. However we hear everything about how his girlfriend is an OF model. WTF is going on here?


Glossy-magazine journalism.


So despite that, they have not shipped a single major feature. I guess the effort is going to making sure the site runs at all.

So much for the everything app.


What do you consider a major feature?

There has been lot's of updates. Most of them you need to be a paid user.

Bookmarks for example is free for everyone.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium


As I hinted, for an app that wants to be an "accelerant to the everything app" (Musks's words) we're sitting incredibly still yet. A major feature would be anything that the Chinese WeChat has, which inspired Musk for his "everything app" vision.

Twitter has been quite idle, even for just a "short text post" app in the past year+.

Bookmarks, BTW, were introduced in February 2018. So what's that supposed to be an example of?

The Premium features you list are also unimpressive, and even without considering that Premium users are less than 1% of all Twitter users.

Longer posts are a very trivial patch, which doesn't consider the history of Twitter which intentionally limited posts to create a timeline of quick updates. Twitter could've ALWAYS had longer posts. But they knew they SHOULDN'T. And even today, few Premium users write long posts.

Similarly with longer videos. Who watches longer videos on Twitter? I know Tucker Carlson posts long videos, and that's the only example I can think of. I know of no one else who posts long videos. It's there on paper, but it's literally "longer/bigger {existing thing}". That's not a major new feature.

What else am I supposed to consider a "major feature" in your link, I don't know. "Less ads"? That's not a major feature. X Pro is rebranded TweetDeck, also not a new feature.

We really got nothing. Nothing.

There's supposed to be a payment feature, a banking feature, a dating site, a job search and so on. The last one is supposedly introduced. It's very hard to find, because it's nowhere in the apps, so for all intents and purposes it's not even part of X at all. It's just some rando job subdomain on the site that no one knows about or uses.

The closest thing to a major feature was "one to one videocalls". Something oddly not in the link you posted, despite it's a Premium feature, imagine the lack of internal coordination not to list their biggest feature on that page!

But even that feature is basically "unlisted Twitter Space". That's all it is. Spaces is also a pre-existing feature. Not listing it is not a major feature, but I'll let it slide somewhat, because it's a trivial patch, but a new use case.

I can't count Grok, because Grok is at best a pilot program. Only accessible to Premium+ users (even less than Premium users), only in a short list of specific countries and in a low volume "waiting list" manner. It's also not an X asset, it's developed by a separate company (xAI is only tangential to X) meaning Twitter devs weren't the ones who made it, X is not the one who owns it, and on the X side it requires no new major features, because you basically text DMs to Grok and it texts DMs back at you. It's a Twitter bot. There's nothing new there for X to add, except a few setting buttons. But Grok never scaled up, maybe it can't scale up, and no one is talking about it.

Musk can't innovate with Twitter. He's stuck. All resources seem focused on maintaining Twitter to exist. Twitter will never be more than it ever was. In fact it's less than it ever was in the past year.



But I was told by the Tesla stock holders that he was not only a billionaire but also a saint and a wise man.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: